I don't blame people who love this game. The detailed graphics, decent storytelling, and original concept make Rapture one of the most unique and stylised worlds I've seen in a 3D computer game (let alone a shooter). The awesome-looking Big Daddies are cool, too. Killing them is difficult but lucrative, yet they never attack unless provoked. Therefore, fighting them is always your choice, and usually feels like a high-stakes gamble.

The novelty of Rapture wears off though, and eventually the cluttered enclosures become claustrophobic and the golden art deco style just feels gaudy. Everything starts to feel as repetitive and visually overloaded as Rapture's populace. The citizens are portrayed as depraved, violent, blathering lunatics, and boss characters are sadistic and maniacal caricatures. The game tries to paint you as an outsider who's forced to observe the sad consequences of an unhinged society. In reality though, Bioshock revels in the depravity of its world, and little separates your character from the lunatics you kill. The gore, the splattered blood, the maniacal screams, your plasmid super-powers, it's all cartoonish and over-the-top.

Bioshock occasionally takes itself seriously and invites you to critique Rapture's foundational philosophies, but it's all so obvious and simplistic. It essentially asks you: What would happen if people built a Utopian society based on social Darwinism, run by an ego-maniacal tyrant, where science gave everyone access to godlike powers? The answer: everything would go sour and chaos would erupt....surprise, surprise. I've played games that gave me food for thought about politics and society (Deus Ex comes to mind) but Bioshock isn't one of them.

The mechanics could be better too. The many plasmids and upgrades you have feel like they came out of a slower RPG, and finding the right weapon or plasmid in the heat of the moment feels fiddly and stressful. A confusing map interface and respawning enemies don't make the experience more satisfying, either.

In the end, I found that I was trudging my way through these garish, stifling levels mainly to see how the story turned out. Eventually I gave up about halfway through and just read the synopsis on wikipedia. Maybe the feel of the game changed dramatically in the latter half, rendering this review inaccurate, but I doubt it.

I wanted to like Bioshock, but the cartoonish brutality and clumsy mechanics just weren't for me. I'm grateful for it because it's set some worthwhile benchmarks for the industry in terms of art direction and originality, but once the lustre wore off, I found much of the game to be frustrating, unpleasant and repetitive.

I am VERY interested in this game and was about to get it until I read the reviews. I'm not going to buy this and any other that comes with crappy and problematic kinds of drm, the funny part with this is that it just makes people run away and get pirated and cracked copies instead.

That's all I wanted to say.